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The only appropriate response was to kill something.

The elite squadrons guarding Lusankya fought with tremendous skill. Czulkang Lah made sure that the patterns flown by the blaze bugs, showing the development of that conflict, would be seared into the memory of the worldship’s brain. He knew he would enjoy watching it again and again.

Coralskipper squadrons entering that combat zone emerged depleted, tattered … when they emerged at all.

Reports of his sensor advisers indicated that the coralskipper assaults were taking their toll. New Republic pilots were falling. And Lusankya was being taken to pieces. Despite the fact that an unusual amount of power was being directed into her shields, the ship’s weapons batteries were silent, and great chunks of metal were said to be tearing free of the superstructure under the constant pounding from coralskippers and capital ships that ventured close enough to strike.

Wedge charged out of the operations center. The biotics building shook with the pounding it received from distant plasma cannons, impacts so loud that he couldn’t hear his own boots on the duracrete floor. Chunks of the ceiling rained down; he threw his arms over his head for protection, catching a blow on his right wrist from descending debris.

He made it up the staircase to the ground level without seeing any other personnel. That gave him a grim satisfaction. No one had managed to outstubborn him, to defy his orders in order to make sure that Wedge had company on his escape. It was a little comforting, but the thought that he might be the last member of the New Republic standing on Borleias was oddly unsettling.

Through the transparisteel in the doors at the end of the main hall he could see distant flashes, narrow red streaks heading one way at the speed of light, more wobbly orange-red streaks headed the other, clear evidence that Wedge’s last forces were still fighting their delaying action. Then he slammed through the doors, emerging onto the kill zone, and could see that the engagement was continuing at every degree of the compass.

The kill zone itself was full of craters and destroyed vehicles. Everything that had been fit to fly was up in space now; the vehicles too wrecked to lift off had been destroyed by Wedge’s engineers, standard operating procedure, though the Yuuzhan Vong were not in the habit of studying captured technology. Some of them had been additionally hit by distant plasma cannon fire aimed at the biotics building. There were no functional vehicles to be seen.

No functional vehicles. Where was his shuttle?

Then he recognized it, a heap of burning metal whose shape suggested it had once been a Lambda-class shuttle.

Wedge grimaced. A pilot had died waiting for him. It was another tally mark for the list—the list he’d once hoped he’d retired; the one he carried in his heart.

He shoved the thought to one side. He’d join that list in a minute if he didn’t act. Punctuating his thought, a plasma cannon projectile hit the biotics building far over his head, plowing through ferrocrete and transparisteel, sending sharp, lethal chunks down toward him.

Wedge sprinted away from the building’s face. There was no purpose in going into the main docking bay, except perhaps to hide; it was open, and he could see from here that nothing more useful than a small cargo lifter was left within it.

The special operations docking bay was almost intact, though, and still closed. Wedge hoped they hadn’t booby-trapped it. He reached the main door, tapped his authorization code into the keypad, and then flinched as he heard the biotics building take a hit from something big. The force of the explosion, though weakened by distance, pushed him into the door. He spun to look and watched as the building folded over like a fighter punched once too often in the midsection; the top portion at the center tumbled down onto the kill zone where he’d been standing just seconds before.

The docking bay door ground open. He backed in and spun, eyes trying to pierce the darkness of the interior even